The multi-period vehicle routing problem with refueling decisions: Traveling further to decrease fuel cost?

Fábio Neves-Moreira, Mário Amorim-Lopes and Pedro Amorim

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 2020, vol. 133, issue C

Abstract: Most vehicle routing approaches disregard the need to refuel fleets. However, planners search for opportunities to refuel at lower prices even if, counter-intuitively, distant fuel stations need to be visited. We propose a novel mathematical formulation and develop branch-and-cut and matheuristic algorithms to efficiently tackle this problem. Results indicate that, to minimize costs, detour distances may increase up to 6 percentage points when fuel stations with lower prices are farther away from the depot. For practice, these insights imply that current policies disregarding station location and/or fuel prices along with “myopic” planning horizons may lead to sub-optimal decisions.

Keywords: Transportation; Vehicle routing; Refueling decisions; Branch-and-cut; Matheuristic; Managerial insights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2019.11.011

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